HTC’s Droid DNA makes sacrifices in the name of pixel density

The 1080p display is easy on the eyes, but hard on the battery.

Enlarge / The HTC Droid DNA has a gorgeous screen, but it makes serious compromises to accommodate it.

Andrew Cunningham

HTC is having a troubling 2012. Its revenue is way, way down from 2011; it looked to be losing a patent suit with Apple when it settled earlier this week; and it drew some ire recently for pulling the plug on Jelly Bean updates for phones made as recently as this year. At the risk of making an understatement, the company needs a win.

That's one of the reasons we're paying special attention to the company's recently announced Droid DNA handset. The device marries the quick quad-core Snapdragon chip used by the Optimus G and Nexus 4 to a 5-inch 1080p display that boasts a whopping 440ppi density. The more pixels you pack into a display, though, the more tradeoffs you need to make elsewhere, particularly in graphics performance and battery life. Our full review will go into more detail on all of these points, but our first few days with this phone indicate these compromises might not be worth it for most users.

A phone with more pixels than my TV

There's no denying the screen on the Droid DNA is very, very nice to look at. The color is great and it's every bit as bright as the screen used by the Optimus G. There's basically no vantage point from which you can make out any of the individual pixels. The phone's 5-inch screen makes it just a bit taller and a hair wider than the 4.7-inch phones, but unlike the Galaxy Note line it's not so much bigger that it impacts how you use the phone. If you're already used to Big Ol' Android Phones, the size increase doesn't make much of a difference.

That said, bumping the screen's resolution from near-720p to 1080p doesn't have the same return as going from, say, the screen on the iPhone 3GS to the screen on the iPhone 4. You'll notice some differences in the rendering of very, very small text—small print that is pixelated-but-legible on the Optimus G looks crystal clear on the Droid DNA—but most things don't look that different to the naked eye, especially at a normal viewing distance.

Enlarge/ Small text that is slightly distorted on the Optimus G's screen.

The increased density also causes a few problems for some apps that don't quite seem prepared for it—as we saw in our Nexus 10 review, some application icons and graphics look a little blurry at extremely high resolutions. Other apps seemed to have some rendering problems.

Some apps, like Chrome here, suffer from blurriness and odd rendering problems on the 1080p display.

Andrew Cunningham

What you leave behind

If you're a stickler for pixel density, the Droid DNA's screen is going to make you happy. But, as mentioned above, you'll make some definite, measurable tradeoffs in other departments to get it.

The first tradeoff is graphics performance. Again, the Droid DNA uses the same quad-core, 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 chip and Adreno 320 GPU as both the LG Optimus G and the Nexus 4. This is the most powerful SoC we've seen in any Android phone to date, but it has to work that much harder to push all of the two-million-plus pixels of the DNA's screen.

Obviously, despite similar screens sizes, frame rates are lower on the DNA's 1080p screen than they are on the Optimus G's 1280x768 screen. For many games this may not matter. The GLBenchmark Onscreen tests max out at 60 frames per second; even at 1080p the Droid DNA can almost reach that in the Egypt Classic test. But long-term, it's something to keep an eye on.

It's also worth noting the Droid DNA gets very, very hot while under load. We didn't see any of the heat-related performance throttling noticed in the Nexus 4, but the phone is just shy of uncomfortable to hold when it's really working.

The drop in graphics performance is measurable, but it doesn't have a huge effect on usability. Today's games aren't yet to the point where they're pushing GPUs like the Adreno 320 or the ones in Apple's A6 and A6X as hard as they can. UI performance is slightly laggy in spots despite Jelly Bean, but past experience would lead me to blame HTC's Sense UI for these problems rather than the underlying hardware. The more damning compromise the DNA makes in the name of pixel density is battery life. At best, the Droid DNA takes a sizable step down from other phones in its class.

We'll perform more thorough general-use battery life testing for our full review, but to get some idea of how the DNA stacked up to the competition I fired up GLBenchmark 2.5's Egypt HD battery life test. That runs the benchmark in a continuous loop to drain the battery. We ran the test simultaneously on the Droid DNA, the Optimus G, and Samsung's Galaxy S III (which uses an older dual-core version of the Snapdragon S4).

We first enabled Airplane Mode on all three phones to remove a few variables from the equation, and then set all three phones to 50 percent brightness—all three of these screens are about equally bright, so this should make for a fairly accurate apples-to-apples comparison. The Galaxy S III's 2100 mAh battery fared the best of the three—it drained after three hours and four minutes. The Optimus G's 2100 mAh battery was close behind at two hours and 55 minutes, a fairly impressive feat given the latter phone's increased speed. Meanwhile, the Droid DNA's 2020 mAh battery lasted only two hours and 24 minutes, about 18 percent lower than the Optimus G and around 22 percent lower than the Galaxy S III. The Droid DNA uses a battery that's about four percent smaller than either of the other phones, but you'll lose much more battery life than that.

Crank up the brightness, and things become even less favorable for the Droid DNA. At 100 percent brightness, the phone fully drained its battery in about an hour and 45 minutes, while the Galaxy S III lasted for around an hour longer. The Optimus G's screen brightness is automatically reduced to about 50 percent when the phone gets too hot, which prevents us from making a direct comparison between the two handsets here. Even so, it's a safe bet it would still last longer than the Droid DNA.

Because of how hard GLBenchmark pushes phones, keep in mind these numbers represent a worst-case scenario for battery life. The situation will doubtlessly improve under lighter, more typical use patterns. Still, compared to other phones in its class, the DNA might have trouble making it through an eight-hour work day without needing to be charged.

Mo' pixels, mo' problems

Enlarge/ The Droid DNA (left) and Optimus G (right) share many characteristics, but the DNA's 1080p display makes all the difference (for better and for worse).

Andrew Cunningham

We can't help but feel that in pursuit of a nice bullet point to mention in marketing materials, HTC gave up features that will be more useful to more people. The handset's battery life, in particular, is mediocre in the best of cases. That situation only gets worse the harder you push the hardware.

Our full review will go deeper into the software, general-use battery life, and the phone's other features. But early signs make the Droid DNA look like an unbalanced phone that will appeal only to a very small niche—those who value pixel density above all else. The quality of the screen is truly excellent, but without a larger battery to help power it you may not be able to look at it very long.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.